Dr Paul Allen

I made a life plan when I was ten years old (yeah, I know, crazy). It included all the normal things: graduate high school, go to college, travel the world. With regards to romance, though, I always assumed I would get married at 23, because “Why not?” and “Surely I’ll have met somebody by then.” So, in my late teens, I arbitrarily picked a date (today, April 22, 2017) as my likely wedding day because (a) it’s a few months before my 24th birthday and (b) because I’ve always wanted a spring wedding. I added details about kids and jobs and travel along the way, but my plan has remained mostly unchanged. Pretty straightforward, right? Except the God I serve isn’t always a straightforward God. He is straightforward in what he wants from me: to act justly, love kindness, and to walk humbly with him (Micah 6:8), and to set nothing above him in my heart, mind, or soul ( Deuteronomy 6:5). But what about beyond that? What about my wedding day? Much to the woe of my control-des...

In the last few tragic days, I received the following comment in my twitter feed from an Australian journalist. AIDS researchers and a Catholic nun among #MH17 victims. If you believe in a god, this would seriously be testing your faith. I replied, Well, most of all, and sadly, it tests your faith in humanity who do these things to each other. The journalist was kind enough to ‘favourite’ my tweet as her reply. I think she recognised that before we rush to blame God , we should direct our blame on those directly responsible for such evil: the terrorist who fired the rocket launcher; the persons who supplied the hardware and training to fire it. More broadly in recent days, it is not God who burned down Mosul ’s church, but the ISIS militants. It is not God who butchered a hundred villagers in Damboa , Nigeria, with RPGs and machine guns, but Boko Haram . That’s where the clear and immediate moral responsibility lies: with the human evildoers. However, once we’v...